Nearly two years after an Oxford University professor filed the original freedom-of-information request, the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office has overruled the University of East Anglia and ordered the institution to release a pair of files containing weather station data.
Oxford physics professor Jonathan Jones was one of various individuals, including Steve McIntyre of the blog Climate Audit, who had sought access to the underlying data used to track and calculate temperature changes around the globe. In this case, the request pertained to a pair of files released to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The UEA’s Climate Research Unit cited various reasons in denying the requests, including the fact that it did not have permission from all of the agencies and organizations that provided primary data.
The decision, dated 23 June and released today, hardly comes as a surprise given that the ICO has previously stated that the university broke the law in denying similar requests (for background, see our coverage here and here). But in the words of McIntyre himself, it might well represent the “”https://climateaudit.org/2011/06/27/ico-orders-uea-to-produce-crutem-station-data/“>closing chapter” of the dispute. The ICO ruling gave the university 35 days to comply and release the data. What follows is a summary of the arguments made by the university and ICO’s response, available in PDF form here.
Argument 1: the data is already publicly available
UEA directed Jones to public databases and suggested a four-stage process for reconstructing more than 97 percent of the data. The ICO said the question is whether the public can access not a reasonable proportion of the information but all of the information. Furthermore, the ICO said the information is buried within a much larger dataset – one that admittedly contains more data from more weather stations than was actually being requested – and reproducing the data “would appear to require information technology skills beyond those possessed by many members of the public.”
Argument 2: releasing the data would have had an adverse effect on “international relations”
UAE argued that the release would break agreements with data providers, including national meteorological services from other countries, and could thus “undermine the relationship between UK and other countries or international organizations.” In particular, UEA argued, World Meteorological Organization rules allow parties that provide data to place restrictions on the use of said data, so a move by the UK to ignore those restrictions could undermine confidence and ultimately reduce the amount of data exchanged freely among countries.
The commissioner set a high bar by saying UAE needed to identify a specific adverse effect that would result from the release of the data and then demonstrate that the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in releasing the data. UAE did neither, according to the ruling.
Arguments 3 & 4: releasing the data would have an adverse effect on “intellectual property rights” and the “interests of the information provider”
UEA argued that intellectual property rights of various parties, including UEA itself, could be compromised. The university would lose control over its own product and would lose the right of commercial exploitation. Similarly, UEA argued there could be impacts on the national meteorological organizations that provided the data. In particular, they could lose income from potential commercialization as well as the ability to collect weather data from other private providers.
The commissioner saw no compelling evidence for either argument, pointing out that UEA itself has used the fact that most of the data is already publicly available as a reason for not releasing it. Moreover, when the UK Met Office contacted those organizations to see if there would be objections to releasing the data, most of those that responded offered no substantial objections.